Friday, February 19, 2016

Simplify your life - Easier said than done

Any parent will attest to the fact that parenting is never easy. Some people seem to have it down to the perfect job and claim to find parenting as the best job they were ever gifted with. All be it the best, it is never easy.

Parents with more than one child or multiples will surely agree that some days are like walking into your worst nightmare. Tantrums, very little sleep and having to reprimand less than nice attitudes can be exhausting. Add to that jobs that require all your free time and family responsibilities, sometimes it just seems down right impossible.

I find myself in that place lately. Homework from grade 1 and grade 3 has somewhat put a damper on our enthusiasm to parent with love. Its like an ungrateful and unthankful job that very rarely pays anything at all. Of course having four kids as I do is naturally exhausting, but school has magnified the exhaustion to a completely new level.

Today I spoke to a young man who said that he has epilepsy. Upon asking him what the cause was, he said it was stress. My response was "simplify your life". As I walked away I thought about that statement a bit, as I have heard it said so many times in conjunction with 'easier said than done'. But on my walk back into the building we were standing outside of, I really wondered what simplifying my life would be. ADD makes everything a lot more complex than it needs to be really, and I know fare well that my coping mechanisms are running dry at this point. Simplifying my life would be a dream, if I could turn my brain off from the tons of things its seems to believe I have to complete. Parenting has of course exhastibated the problem which has now turned me into a walking fuse, ready to short circuit at any moment.

A Simple life would mean one job I loved, children who responded with love and being able to sit on the couch without having something else to worry about next. Instead, I have three active jobs, only two of which pay, my kids respond with screeching no's when we talk to them and sitting on the couch to do nothing sends my entire being into a frenzy. Realistically, its my own fault all of this is going on. When I had nothing to do, I went and found something to do, now I never have nothing to do, ever! For some reason, the tasks just seem to pile up more everyday, and slowly there are things falling through the cracks.

Now, on top of parenting being as hard as it is, standard, there are all these etc etc etc in the way, and I can tell my brain is starting to throw in the towel at what I continue to expect it to do daily. I really do need to simplify my life, not for me, but because parenting is hard, and lately something I pretend I don't have to do; but for
my kids, who need me to be a parent, not a blogger, not a photographer, not a Doula, and not ADD. Parenting will always be hard, but the next few years is the only time I am ever going to get to make it count, the rest will happen when it happens.